Case Study

Cask Accelerates Time to Market for Lotame’s Game-Changing Audience Optimizer

Challenge

Lotame is the universal cross-device data management platform that is humanizing the consumer decision journey by empowering enterprises to deliver more relevant content, products, and services. For its Audience Optimizer offering, Lotame needed a data warehouse to track and store consumer interactions with marketing campaigns and content to model and analyze that data for predictive analytics for its customers’ ad campaigns.

Benefits of Cask Solution

By building on top of the Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), Lotame was able to quickly create a new real-time warehouse that flexibly pulls historical user data, churns through and applies machine learning to all users. CDAP provided a powerful API, and the amount of code necessary to build was minimal.

Lotame was pleasantly surprised by a faster time to market for Audience Optimizer than anticipated.

Building Audience Optimizer with CDAP was much easier than expected.

With CDAP, Lotame is able to get historic data from as many user profiles as necessary and can conduct the necessary modeling to deliver insights that maximize digital marketing and ad campaign efficiency.

Looking Back to Data Past

Lotame offers a universal cross-device data management platform that humanizes the consumer decision journey by enabling companies to deliver more relevant content, products and services. With Lotame, brands, agencies, and publishers can learn more about their most valuable audiences, find the best prospects, and execute on targeted ad campaigns and content strategies.

Lotame found its customers were faced with a challenge in today’s digital world: Unlike marketers in the world of print, who have content-based plans and direct ads at the page rather than the user, digital publishers and marketers are in the unique position of being able to gather insight on consumers through their interactions. Lotame puts this capability into the hands of its clients by giving publishers, agencies, and marketers insight on digital users. Lotame’s Audience Optimizer targets key audiences across smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops using machine-learning technology to maximize the efficiency of digital marketing against specific KPI’s; it does this by extending a brand’s most valuable audiences to deliver the best possible ROI.

“Audience Optimizer, which is powered by CDAP, augments campaigns to the person – the ‘who’ – rather than the where or when,” said Jeremy Pinkham, Lotame Chief Technology Officer. “It analyzes the behavior of a specific audience to determine whether they will be more likely to engage with an ad. That’s powerful for brands.”

“The amount of code we needed to write was minimal with CDAP, and it was much easier and faster than we ever expected.”

– Jia-Long WU,
Lotame Data Architect

However, before Lotame was able to offer this solution, the company needed a data warehouse to track and store past behaviors and marketing interactions, including exposures to advertisements, mobile app interactions, web page clicks, and downstream brand interactions. Lotame also needed a solution that would allow it to utilize that data for predictive analytics for clients’ ad campaigns at scale.

“To develop this new application, Audience Optimizer, we needed a platform that would allow us to collect and track users as they went through various paths on websites, apps, and advertisements over a period of time so we could conduct modeling, apply machine learning and deliver predictive analytics for our customers to improve ad campaigns,” said Jia-Long Wu, Lotame Data Architect. “We also needed to analyze users’ past behaviors, which was not possible with most solutions we looked at – then we found CDAP.”

Fast Time to Market with CDAP

With the Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), Lotame built a new real-time warehouse, because its existing warehouse did not allow it to flexibly pull historical user data out the way it was needed, churn through it and apply machine learning to all users. With CDAP, Lotame is able to do bulk operations and get the historic data from as many user profiles as necessary, fit them into the analytic workload and conduct the necessary modeling.

“CDAP is a big win for us.”

– Jia-Long WU,
Lotame Data Architect

CDAP, a 100% open source framework for distributed data and applications, is a layer of software running on top of native and commercial Hadoop distributions, allowing organizations to accelerate the development of applications and their deployment into production. By significantly reducing the amount of manual coding, it cuts the average time to implement by more than 80%. Because it integrates with new and existing data stores, it delivers significant value for enterprises in a data-heavy environment, slashing development and deployment timelines, as it did for Lotame.

“Time to market was critical for this application, and we were pleasantly surprised at the results using CDAP.”

– Jia-Long WU,
Lotame Data Architect

Wu was impressed with the time to develop and go to market using CDAP. “We had a prototype of Audience Optimizer that we were able to quickly validate and test, using CDAP and its powerful API,” said Wu. “Most of the time we spent was data science work developing the modeling for Audience Optimizer – nothing to do with CDAP. The amount of code we needed to write was minimal with CDAP, and it was much easier and faster than we ever expected, which we loved.”

All in all, Lotame is excited to work on other applications using CDAP, especially based on the success it has had with Audience Optimizer. “CDAP has worked great for this particular application, and it scales really well for production traffic,” said Wu. “We’re currently using it for developing another application we hope to launch fairly soon.”

“Time to market was critical for this application, and we were pleasantly surprised at the results using CDAP,” said Wu. “We are also using CDAP as a dashboard to monitor and report on the infrastructure operations. In other words, we are using it to make sure that user profile data is being updated, which is critical to ensure Audience Optimizer is working properly to deliver analytics for customers. That’s been a nice bonus. We are also happy with its scalability and high availability. CDAP is a big win for us.”